The Image of the Peasant Within National Museums in the Nordic Countries

The Image of the Peasant within National Museums in the Nordic Countries Peter Aronsson National narratives are crucial to the construction of legitimate citizenship: who belongs to what community, what qualifies inclusion and exclusion, what virtues are celebrated and what vices are refuted? These questions do not have arbitrary answers, but instead are connected to rather stable ideas of states and nation, and are continuously changing alongside the emergence of new ideals and new territorial boundaries. The new ideas, which restructured earlier sets of feudal relationships at the turns of 18th and 19th centuries, show a remarkable resemblance, at least superficially, to those appearing in many parts of the world where social and political conditions might instead imply a greater variety of ideals. Cultural transfer and the creation of narratives of uniqueness appear hand in hand. The idea of citizenship itself might be seen as an infusion of aristocratic ideas of individual rights into a bourgeois setting, a Bürgerlische Öffentlich- keit, developing an independent sphere of equality, freedom of speech, toler- ance, and mutual respect. But at the same time as rapid change and turmoil, historical vision imagery was transformed from an earlier construction of a glorious past with Biblical and classical references into a national history where the persistence of an independent peasant culture that supposedly thrived before the development of a stratified society and the state created a decisive starting point. This is true for 19th century cultural Swedish heroes such as E.G. Geijer and E. Tegnér – but also for Karl Marx. This is the case for Sweden, which had a large number of historical free-owning peasantry within 18th and 19th C societies, but also for Denmark, which had just created a class of that standard, and for Iceland, which was more dominated by fish- ing than by toiling the soil, and finally for Romania. A similar idea of a pre- state condition of equality, freedom, and happiness unites the narratives of the Bible, Das Kapital, and the bourgeois elites trying to secure their under- standing of citizenship and territorial sovereignty in the 19th century.1 1 Patterns of national historiographies have been mapped by Berger, Stefan, "National Histo- riographies in Transnational Perspective: Europe in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries", Storia della Storiografia, no. 50 (2006), p. 3-26. 187 The timing and more precise connotations of bringing the peasantry into the narrative of the national-state – and possibly out of it – as manifested at national museums in the Nordic countries are the focus of this essay. Fur- thermore the relationship between representation in other public forms, for instance regional museums, will be discussed to establish the point when and how the peasant was moved into the centre of national narrative in national museums of archaeology and ethnology, and open-air and art museums. What values of relevance to the construction of political community and citizenship are communicated through the representation of peasantry in the public sphere, specifically within the contemporary displays of national museums? The text’s ambition is to present the need for and challenge of a full investigation of the subject, rather than fully exhausting it. Ideas of citizenship In the early modern state, the main issue was rather how to make people accept the inclusion demanded by the rulers to adhere to the right religion and law, and the king’s right to levy taxes and soldiers and to deliver war power. Examples of the territorial ambivalence are manifold during the Mid- dle Ages, not only in the politics of the aristocracy but also within the decisions made by the organized peasantry to participate on the side of one par- ticular group rather than another – or to stay at home to '”defend their own country”, meaning the old provincial district, not the territory of the state. But we can also find more positive demands for the right of political participation, rule of law, and a direct relationship with the state/the king. In the 17th century this is articulated in terms of national identity similarly to the ‘working class of pastoral England”: fri odalbonde, a freeholder, is an even more demanding identity than the equivalent ”free-born Englishman” be- cause it not only implies secured property rights and protection under the law, but also implies direct political participation in the forth Estate of the Diet, based on the argument of custom existing from time immemorial.2 It is by now well known that the late 18th century is the point at which the ideology of nationalism charges citizenship with its more wide-ranging as- pects of cultural, moral, and historical heritage and closes the scope of eco- nomics, culture, and education within the national borders with a high degree of ideological legitimacy. The issue of exclusion became, according to the minor research field that deals with the development of historical citizenship in Sweden and Scandinavia, ideologically demanding for ordinary people 2 Aronsson, Peter, „Der Schwedische Reichstag als vormodernes Parlament. Zur Repräsenta- tion von Bürgern und Bauern", in Blickle, Peter (ed.), Landschaften und Landstände in Ober- schwaben. Bäuerliche und bürgerliche Repräsentation im Rahmen des frühen europeischen Parlamentarismus (Tübingen 2000.), p. 267-280. 188 due to the development of a mobilizing nationalism in the 19th century, and economically demanding due to the emergence of the modern welfare state in the 20th century. Between these came military conscription, individual income tax, and universal suffrage.3 It is possible that the early implementation of military tenure (indelnings- verket) and the subsequent successful mobilization of an army loyal to the king, which reinforced a direct link between the king and the peasantry, helped to pave the way for a complex framework for the formalized power of the fourth estate. In the 18th century, the fourth estate gradually became more and more a “pure” estate of freeholding farmers. An overall broad participatory political culture with strong judicial rights, local participation in parish life and regional courts, and the use of negotiation rather than vio- lence for governance was developed at an earlier stage in Sweden than in countries with mercenary armies.4 The groups discerned by contemporary discourse as “the people”, notably the virtuous middle class, were in most countries identified with the bour- geoisie, but in Sweden the alternative of including the peasants, or rather the freeholder, was articulated successfully even among the intellectuals and in the pre-revolutionary parliament. The concepts used for drawing the line between “virtuous” and “dangerous” people could vary. Perhaps a continuum could be drawn from the American case, which not only lacked an aristocracy, but also a peasantry (understood as an uneducated manual labouring mob), leading to the Swedish/Nordic inclusive concept, which first incorporated not only the small farmers into the people, but also, and quite readily, the workers, which was formalized through political alliances during the 1930s. On the other extreme of the continuum, one can place Germany with its more exclusive concept of Volk, making for an entirely different political 3 Tilly, Charles, Contention and democracy in Europe, 1650-2000 (London and New York 2004); Tilly, Charles. Democracy (Cambridge [England] and New York 2007). Most of the Swedish research was on the political struggle between the left and right and more recently on female enfranchisisment: Berling Åselius, Ebba, Rösträtt med förhinder: rösträttsstrecken i svensk politik 1900-1920 (Stockholm 2005); Björk, Gunnela, Att förhandla sitt medborgarskap: kvinnor som kollektiva politiska aktörer i Örebro 1900-1950 (Lund 1999); Edling, Nils, Det fosterländska hemmet: egnahemspolitik, småbruk och hemideologi kring sekelskiftet 1900 (Stockholm1996); Florin, Christina and Kvarnström, Lars (eds.), Kvinnor på gränsen till medborgarskap: genus, politik och offentlighet 1800-1950 (Stockholm 2001); Mellquist, Einar D, Rösträtt efter förtjänst?: riksdagsdebatten om den kommunala rösträtten i Sverige 1862-1900 (Stockholm1974); Berge, Anders, Medborgarrätt och egenansvar: de sociala försäkringarna i Sverige 1901-1935 (Lund 1995). 4 Aronsson, Peter, Bönder gör politik: det lokala självstyret som social arena i tre smålands- socknar, 1680-1850 (Lund1992); Aronsson, Peter, "Swedish Rural Society and Political Culture: The Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Experience", Rural History 3, no. 1/ 1992, p. 41-57; Österberg, Eva and Sogner, Sølvi (eds.), People meet the law: control and conflict- handling in the courts: the Nordic countries in the post-reformation and pre-industrial period (Oslo 2000). 189 agenda.5 The role of peasant varied depending on the claims made on citizenship in these different political cultures. In the Swedish 19th century debates on (communal) citizenship, an inter- esting array of arguments was brought forward. Behind the prevailing arguments for a census and graded votes based on property was either a meri- tocratic idea that the wealthier were among the best in virtue of their success, or the old-fashioned opinion of an inherent connection between wealth, bet- ter birth, and virtue. A more communal view was expressed by the argument of participation according to the dues and duties performed. This principle was also conversant with the commercial model of an incorporated company. Everyone who contributed to the execution of the decisions should in this line of argument have a say – perhaps in accordance to the size of the work or money placed into the common effort. In this argument it is not property itself, but rather the ability and duty to contribute that rationalizes the privilege of citizenship. Thus, the argument for property could be developed or resonate in different discourses on the basis of participation: merit, virtue, competence, stability, or the association of taxpayers (a society or company).6 There is often a broadening of the argument by the national project in both a democratic and moral dimension.

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